CICS Configuration Manager
IBM CICS Configuration Manager (CICS CM) is a tool for managing and maintaining CICS resource definitions. In particular, CICS CM helps you to manage changes to resource definitions across CICS regions, enabling you to systematically migrate a set of changes that have been made in your development CICS environment to your test environment, and then on to your production environment. At each stage, you can back out changes.
Depending on the configuration of your CICS systems, your CICS resource definitions may be stored in CICS system definition (CSD) files, CICSPlex SM (CPSM) data repositories, or a combination of both, spread across multiple CICS regions.
All CICS installations sometimes need to update their applications, and many do it continually. This normally involves updating CICS resource definitions. This can be a complex task, increasingly so if the topology of your CICS regions is complex.
CICS CM handles all the complexities this can involve. It deals with all aspects of the tasks involved where applications are to be migrated through a range of environments, such as from development to test and to production. It is transparent whether regions are managed by CICSPlex SM or have their configuration data stored in CSD files. Changes can automatically be backed out if required. Updates can be grouped in packages. A system of controls can be introduced, to record changes for audit purposes, to avoid promoting changes unexpectedly made by unauthorized users, and to ensure the appropriate level of approval for migrations.
Change and then migrate resource definitions across multiple CICS environments, regardless of whether the definitions are stored in CSD files or CICSPlex SM date repositiries.
With CICS CM you can:
- Automatically handle changes to CICS resource definitions.
- Simplify the task of managing new application development through test and deployment.
- Ease CICS systems administration and, in the process, help lower maintenance costs and reduce downtime caused by administrative errors.
- Promote, subject to approval, individual definitions or sets of definitions from one CICS configuration to another.
- Edit resource definitions while the regions that use them are inactive.
- View and compare resource-definition histories.
CICS CM, a member of the IBM CICS tools family, enhances management of CICS resource definitions and fully supports Transaction Server Version 3.1. You can gain additional productivity improvements by using CICS CM in conjunction with CICS Performance Analyzer.
CICS Configuration Manager is branded and distributed internationally by IBM.